Sheldon Alberts: Palin seeks privacy for her and 536,971 of her closest friends

WASHINGTON: It’s the modern American nightmare – taking your family on a quiet driving holiday to the nation’s historic sites, only to have the whole thing spoiled by a throng of pesky reporters following your every movement.

This is the disaster scenario confronting Sarah Palin as she, Todd and Piper make their way up the East Coast this week to see the sights. The former Alaska governor woke up Tuesday morning to find reporters from Politico, all the big networks – heck, maybe even TMZ – stalking her tour bus, awaiting her next move. Palin has made it very clear she does not want the media tagging along. The only people she told about her One Nation bus tour were the 536,971 followers (and counting) on Twitter and the three million-plus folks who like her on Facebook.

But those ‘lamestream media’ types showed up anyway, causing a frenzy when she arrived on the back of a motorcycle over the Memorial Day weekend at the Rolling Thunder rally in Washington.

The media pack also tracked her every movement at Gettysburg, staking out Civil War memorial sites in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the ex-politician who might just be the next president of the United States, or who might just be playing the journalistic establishment for fools.

Palin is proving to be no easy mark – she managed to keep the media hounds at bay for a while on Tuesday, sneaking out a back way from her hotel, then sending her tour bus off in a different direction while she rode in an unmarked car to the Gettysburg National Military Park.

The venerable Associated Press have been so confounded by Palin’s movements they have taken to officially calling her trip a “secretive tour.”

Of course, it’s no secret at all.

A local Fox affiliate was able to track down the Fox News contributor at the military cemetery. And somehow, Fox late-night host Greta Van Susteren snuck aboard Palin’s bus, where she conferred sympathetically with the former Republican vice presidential candidate about those “crazy” journalists bothering her all the time.

Palin made a couple of things clear. This tour is absolutely not about her, not about her potential presidential campaign and not about getting publicity. But if reporters absolutely insist on following her around, Palin told Van Susteren she was determined to make them earn their pay. Here’s what she had to say to her Fox colleague:

“I know that many in the mainstream media are looking for kind of a conventional, campaign-type tour, and I’ve said from the beginning, this isn’t a campaign tour except to campaign on our Constitution, our charters of liberty. And they want the kind of conventional idea of, ‘We want a schedule, we want to follow you, we want you to bring us along with you.’ I’m like, A) I don’t think I owe anything to the mainstream media. I think that it would be a mistake for me to become some kind of conventional politician and doing things the way that it has always been done with the media in terms of relationship with them. Tell them to come along, and we’ll orchestrate this, we’ll script this and we’ll basically write a story for you, media, about what we are doing every day. No, I want them to have to do a little bit of work on a tour like this, and that would include not necessarily telling them beforehand where every stop is going to be. You know, we’ll do a stop, we’ll do a lot of OTRs – off the records. We’ll meet a lot of great Americans – and then I’ll write about that at the end of the day. It’s not about me. It’s not a publicity-seeking tour. It’s about highlighting the great things about America, and the media can figure out where we are going, if they do their investigative work, or they are going to keep, as you put it, going crazy trying to figure out what we’re doing here.”

So there you have it, media. Stay home and read about Palin’s adventures on her Facebook diary. But just leave her alone, already.